Our programme runs at over three weekends and you must commit to attending all of them. The community that we’ve built on (and across) previous cohorts has been one of the biggest outcomes for people, so it’s a key criterion for selection. The programme is open to researchers, research technicians, academics and for the first time, professional services staff who have a focus on research.

We’ve deliberately chosen this approach for women (including those with family commitments) but realize that it might be useful provide a little additional information which might help you to decide if this programme is something that you can be part of.

The residential weekend model has been very popular and effective with over 90 women from the University including those with children. The weekend model was chosen because many of the women we have worked with struggle to commit to a two day programme within the working week, particularly if they work part-time. Some of the women who have attended the programme in previous years particularly commented on the number of times they had to drop out of training commitments because of the pressure at work. By choosing a weekend model, this pressure is greatly reduced. Another thing we have noticed is that the “psychological” effect of a weekend programme is that it makes it easier to prioritise your own career as you are undertaking the development in your own time. Rather than being something that was decided without consideration of the caring commitments of women, it was chosen specifically becauseof these. We don’t claim that this will work for all women, so a non-residential programme covering similar themes is available (we’ll be publicising this soon.)

Peebles Hydro is one of the most child friendly hotels in Scotland so that anyone who cannot arrange weekend child care can bring their children with them. The hotel offers a fantastic range of activities for children over 2 years old, which we will cover the costs of. Most of our previous attendees have chosen to come alone, but for single parents, breast-feeding mothers or those who’s caring responsibilities aren’t flexible, we do everything we can to make Ingenious Women inclusive and we’ll work with our selected attendees to make the programme work for them.

Having said that, the programme for the three weekends is busy and we work into the evenings to maximise the time we have together. The value comes from the immersive nature of IW and it’s amazing how quickly the network forms and people start to feel the benefits of thinking about themselves and their career.

If you’ve seen details of the programme but hesitated, get in touch with either myself or Nicola. Most compelling though, may be some of the comments from the last cohort.

Ingenious women has led me to greater clarity and inspired practices that are motivating me to increased, better outputs from my work. It has sparked ideas for projects and papers and collaborations that would not have happened otherwise. Watch this space.

I am a new member of staff at the University and consider this a unique opportunity which has allowed me to meet some incredibly talented women and has given to confidence that I’m working at a University that values its staff and their development. I think this investment reflects well on the University. I feel inspired to reach for possibilities within the University that I didn’t know existed or which I previously felt powerless to reach.

Meeting with peers to discuss common challenges has provided valuable confidence in how I approach my daily work, interact with colleagues and generate and execute ideas for future projects.

A UNIQUE opportunity to discover, and learn from an otherwise INVISIBLE cross-section of our institution.

This course definitely increased my self awareness and confidence. Now I know lots of researchers that I can collaborate with to be more successful and productive. My performance at the institution has also improved dramatically following the encouraging conversations and transfer of ideas with other ingenious women.

So, if you are interested in spending three weekends with a group of like-minded colleagues who want to develop their ideas, their career and themselves, don’t hesitate – apply before November 24th!

I subscribe to a magazine which digests the week’s news and always includes a column called “boring but important” which I make myself read (although obviously after I read the “it’s must be true, I saw it in the tabloids” column which is far more entertaining). I planned this blog as I sat in a meeting this afternoon discussing the Concordat for the Career Management of Researchers. As a group of researcher developers we were all very engaged in the discussion and we’ve put a lot of energy over the last couple of years into supporting the idea of a review and now into putting forward our thoughts.

One key feature of the consultation process for the review is that it is open to anyone and we agreed that it’s critical that researchers engage. We then shared our suspicion that although institutions and organisations such as Universities Scotland will be putting forward responses, that individual researchers may not be as aware as we are of the opportunity to contribute and the importance of feeding in your experiences.

This blog is a call to action to our research staff to take a look at the consultation process and let the review panel know what you think. You are the MOST IMPORTANT voice in this process. The Concordat is ten years old. Has it made any difference? Are the guidelines set out in it recognisable and familiar? When you look at the environment and culture in our university, do you think it supports your career management?

I’ll be honest – responding to the Concordat Review may not be the most fun you have this week, but it could be the most important thing you do. Your opinions will be given real weight by the review committee (more weight than my thoughts, I hope), so please take this opportunity to influence a document which will in turn influence funders and institutions. Make yourself comfortable, set aside an hour and have your say.

Although the Newton Bhabha Fund workshop on Clean Energy Research for Rural India is now over there are still a few outstanding posts I want to complete. Our plan is to turn these into a guide for others running these kinds of workshops once we’ve given the participants a few weeks to settle back into their usual routines. Today’s post looks at the theme we covered on day 4 of the workshop when we looked out the resources which facilitating turning ideas into projects.

Clearly a significant factor here is the availability of funding, but we also heard from Stuart Govan, from the Royal Society of Chemistry which co-funded the workshops with the British Council. I’m going to comeback to some of the points that Stuart made in a future post, but to be efficient, here is a link to his slides from the workshop which make it clear how many benefits there are to being an engaged and active member of a professional learned society.

Again, we recognised that the expertise on this topic lay in the group rather than solely with the organisers, so we gave a brief introduction to the general funding and opportunity map as we know it in the UK (with a healthy warning that this is currently in a state of flux). This presentation was based on others I’ve previously given in funding workshops but didn’t focus on international development research opportunities. For this we handed over to the group, first creating 5 headings for them to cluster their knowledge of funding schemes :

visits and exchanges

proof of concept/initial studies/seed funding

workshops and networks

project funding

programme funding

The group produced a wealth of information from both the UK and India. Finding links for all the schemes is going to take some time, but here are a few key funders.

I’m just scratching the surface here of the schemes and funders that the group were aware of – the point is that there is a significant and flexible funding landscape but it is complex – for many schemes you will need partners, so a good starting place is to attend workshops (such as ours) and to ask these questions of your fellow attendees.

For our group the next steps will be a mix of student exchanges, visits and proof of concept funding. If you are interested in engaging with this kind of research, Newton Bhabha (and other Newton Fund iteration) workshop are a great starting point. In the next blog I’ll look at how our attendees became aware of the workshop and why they chose to attend.

Our Newton Bhabha Fund workshop (remember, we’re tweeting about the workshop using #CERRI) was carefully planned with the challenges of international development in mind. We began with a trip to rural villages, spent a day debriefing the visit and ensuring everyone understood the ethos of this type of funding. On the third day, when we stimulated idea generation, we spent the morning listening to people who had a wealth of experience linked to our theme of clean energy and rural India. Then it was time to see what this had prompted from our group.

The night before we did an initial “brain dump” in mixed groups so that people could share initial ideas and I encouraged them to be as creative and open as possible. In planning the workshop, we had in mind a framework for the week. At first we would broaden the perspectives of the participants through the visits and early discussions. In the second half of the week we would try to guide them to find a focus and begin to develop some project ideas. (This is explained as part of an interesting blog on Design Thinking and Social Innovation from Elon University.) When I explained the idea to the workshop PI, I added in an area at the point when you switch from Divergent to Convergent thinking – the “Groan Zone”.

I happily introduced this model and told everyone that we expected them to be uncomfortable and that it was fine and all part of the process. We then asked them to start thinking about what their initial ideas were and asked them to put them onto post-it notes so we could find clusters and overlaps.

The ideas flowed – we quickly filled the wall with possibilities. We merrily grouped them into themes and then stood back. People began to cluster and started to develop their ideas into project outlines with enthusiasm. And all the organisers and guest watched with discomfort, as we realised that despite the exposure to the village environment and a morning of hearing from experts, the group had instantly fallen back into their comfort zone. The projects that were emerging were solution led. The board of ideas was polarised into science problems and social science problems. One of the participants noticed this and everyone agreed that it wasn’t why we were here, but people hesitated to move.

A couple of our speakers intervened and said that the research had to start with the need. They stressed that the need was usually caused by complex, overlapping issues which weren’t respecters of disciplines. They urged the group to go back and start with the need of the villagers and communities.

To help, Neil quickly drafted a set of questions:

WHAT IS THE NEED?

Who are you helping?

What is your impact?

How will you do this?

How will you communicate and engage people in your project?

Everyone went back to their ideas. Slowly, and with some inital difficulty, the need became the priority. The projects were set to one side as the group used the expertise of the guests and the personal experience of village life in the room to deepen their understanding of the need. We nudged one or two groups to take a look at their constituents – we’d noticed that one was devoid of social scientists and another had only one physical scientist. In one of my favourite moments of the workshop so far, a social scientist was “kidnapped” by one group who needed her skills and perspectives. We finished the day with a quick overview of each project and suddenly we started to get excited about what was emerging. Clearly these ideas have the potential to grow in proposals so I won’t share details here but they are now strongly aligned with the principles driving GCRF.

I wanted to write the post about our “near-miss” because there is so little information about the workshop running process that it can be easy to think that they all run like clockwork. We are spoilt here by having someone (me!) who’s only focus is the workshop facilitation and it was still challenging to work out how to intervene and to understand what had caused the slight deviation from the path we’d tried to set up.

I think what happened is that the complexity of the rural environment is such that we all felt a little overwhlemed by the scale of the challenge. Faced with so many unknowns, people retreated a little from the “groan zone” into the comfort of their expertise and disciplines.

The problem with this is that the really beautiful ideas were past this point. We pushed the group out of their comfort zones and better ideas emerged. I’ll be honest about how surprised I was that this didn’t happen naturally, but it’s important to share this to give future workshop leaders an insight so they can look out for the same moment with their groups.

Some advice is to “shine a light” onto the idea generation and development process regularly in the early stages. We had three separate whole group idea sharing slots so we picked up on the limitations of the early projects quickly. We got everyone to put all their ideas onto the wall (using post-its) so the clustering of ideas around disciplines was immediately evident. Neil and the guest experts kept sitting in with the groups whilst the ideas were forming to challenge and guide them. Without these interventions it would have been difficult to spot the issues.

Overnight, the ideas have developed and new ones have emerged. There are now six ideas in development and they are all truly needs-led so the principles of ODA-compliance are embedded from the start. (In the next post I’ll talk a little about the ODA compliance that we discussed as well as sharing some of the resources we’ve found to fund the network and ideas in future.)

Today the group are expanding on their ideas and we’ve given them some new questions for guidance:

CHECK YOUR PROJECT VISION FOR ODA COMPLIANCE

What are the gaps in the idea/stakeholders or team’s skills base?

What are your first steps?

Who needs to be involved?

What resources will you need?

What else is happening in this space? (Do an initial literature search)

Tomorrow is our final day. The focus will be on building ownership of potential projects so everyone leaves with a clear plan and we’ll also think about the best strategies for maintaining the network. And I may cry a little as this has been a very special experience.

As I mentioned in the last post, as part of our Newton Bhabha Fund workshop, taking place in IISER, Pune (remember, we’re tweeting about the workshop using #CERRI) we visited a number of rural villages to meet villagers, community leaders and officers from Maharashtra Arogya Mandal (MAM), an NGO. Yesterday we ran a debrief and Q&A session to help maximise the value of the visit and as part of this I asked the group to share the value the trip had had.

Welcome, Maharashtra India

This is a short summary of those discussions. As the workshop goes on I’m sure the value will be felt in different ways, but for now here are the intial reactions. Please note that we only spent a few hours in the villages so no-one is claiming that we’ve got any depth of insight into the experiences of the villagers. However, even though we haven’t walked a mile in the shoes of the people we met, we have perhaps “seen their shoes”.

We asked these questions about the key influences of the visits:

what sights and conversations have had particular impact?

what key moments have changed or developed your thinking?

(People discussed this in groups so I’ve left the summaries in this format – I’m aware that some will need some clarification or expansion so I’ll add these as I get more information from the groups)

I’ve got a real picture of life in an Indian village

recognise the food-water-energy nexus

seen their low expectations from life

need for low cost and maintable technology

seen the gap between the rural schemes launched and how they are implemented

This blog is part of a series on the Newton Bhabha Fund workshop, taking place in IISER, Pune September 4-8th (we’re tweeting about the workshop using #CERRI) On day one of the workshop we visited a number of rural villages to meet villagers, community leaders and officers from Maharashtra Arogya Mandal (MAM), an NGO. I’d like to take a moment here to thank Sagar Mitkari from MAM for his time on Monday explaining the role and history of his organisation and for helping to arrange the visit to the villages and the Muktangan Tribal Girls Hostel.

The connection with MAM and the visit was organised by Dr Priyadarshini Karve, one of the workshop organisers and the Director of Samuchit Enviro Tech. Priya’s additional role today was to help us to debrief the group, combine experiences (we split up to visited different villages and there is wider experience in the group of other parts of India) and help us begin the process of idea generation. The debrief was an essential part of the early stages of the workshop, as the village visits stimulated a lot of thinking but also some areas of confusion. We spent the afternoon with Priya identifying our new questions and taking advantage of her huge experience.

We split the group into three subgroups taking care to mix people from the four constituent groups on the course (UK/India/Social Science/Physical Science) and from the three visits. We worked for an hour on the following questions, then Priya answered the emerging questions.

Broaden and Share your Perspectives (this was discussed in the groups)

within your group, what else do we know about rural India?

what do you think we need to know?

what was different about the villages visited yesterday?

…and what is different about other rural Indian places?

Seek Clarification (this was the basis of discussion with Priya)

what is missing from your understanding?

what needs clarification or expansion?

Identify Key Influences (this was captured at the end to gauge the value of the visits)

what sights and conversations have had particular impact?

what key moments have changed or developed your thinking?

Rather than give a detailed overview of the problems and ambiguities identified I will select a few and share Priya’s advice. I’ll group some of the questions as they were covered with a single answer.

What do you see as the barriers?

The human element – they may say XYZ when they mean ABC. Problems which are categorised in one way may be something very different = social and economic barriers are easily confused (people can say they can’t afford something rather than admitting they are intimidated or uncomfortable with it). People need to have better understanding of the implications of their decisions (i.e. health impact of cooking with wood fires indoors). Superstitions are still influential, but mobile and television is building awareness of modern lifestyles.

How do we ensure things keep on working when India is changing so quickly? And what if our work impacts in others ways – perhaps by creating conditions which mean people are more likely to leave their villages?

There is rapid urbanisation which is affecting village communities but we also see reverse migration with people preferring to return to village life. Don’t think too much about the how specific individuals might act. Think about how whoever will be living in the village in the future – focus on creating liveable conditions. Also recalibrate your description of yourself – I moved from thinking of myself as someone in rural development to thinking about how I support people to deal with climate change using technology. This reframing can help you focus on what’s important.

There’s so much diversity, even in the three relatively close villages we saw. How do we come up with ideas which can be widely applied?

Don’t try to – there will never be a single solution, but there is more scope to think in terms of a menu of options for people and to put effort into developing methodologies which will help people identify the right solutions or develop their own.

Why aren’t there more skills development programmes to help people use technology more effectively? Why don’t they use the skills they have to engage with technology? (This was prompted by a trip to a village which had broken technology but there were engineers in the village.)

Must take their aspirations into account. Sometimes programmes are offered but not taken because seen as low status – seen as poor relation to university degree or type of training available in cities. Once people are trained to be engineers and start being paid well for this, they are unwilling to work for nothing in the villages. Think about whether you would do your job for nothing when you get home from work…

There is a need for awareness raising, but in some cases there seems to be awareness but no change in behaviour. What can we do about this?

Villagers are people, just like us. We all know what we should do and what is good for us, but do we do it all the time? No! The same psychology applies. We stick with our habits and so do they. Don’t judge them.

Why do so few government schemes work?

They are conceived in Delhi, sent to state capitals, then to districts then to the block level. At this level they make decisions about what to do and then the village leaders decide how to implement. This is a long chain and the initial decision is far removed from the people affected. There can be social pressure from the villagers to keep the decisions on track, but incompetence and issues like caste will derail things.

Having said this there are examples of things being turned around in villages by people pressure. If word of this could spread, people might be inclined to apply similar pressure. Finding local champions who are respected and influential will also help. Teachers can be very powerful.

What is the energy consumption behaviour in the villages?

There is some data about this in limited projects – I’m involved in one to assess this and the way energy is imported and exported to and from the villages. Some of these studies have uncovered important information which show that villages create more wealth for India than they receive in support and benefits.

Shouldn’t we be tacking the bigger societal problems, particualrly around gender and caste inequalities?

Although these have a negative impact on our work it would be a HUGE job to change them. You need to focus on what you can change and can do. I can’t see this or many other barriers going away. Work around them.

How far to people plan ahead? Can we get them to see the benefits in the long-term of some of these developments?

Depends on nature of their lifestyle. If agricultural will think in terms of farming cycles – until the next harvest. If “hunter-gatherer” will think about where next meal is coming from. It’s difficult to change unless their lifestyles start to be affected.

It feels like there is a need for more data and better access to data that exists. (Questions about soil and water testing, information on energy usage, geomapping and other data sources.)

There is a need for this particularly if it would be produced with a visual summary to help people engage with it. Pilot projects on soil and water testing have happened but it’s patchy – led in one case by a teacher who gathered and analysed samples from students when they returned to their home villages. Over 5-6 years this has built into a map of a region. Engaging people with the data is a key issue as this will help drive better data in future.

To paraphrase Priya, she encourages our researchers to focus on what they can do and not be disheartened by what they can’t change. She has learnt that a lot of developments and initiatives come and go, but if you stick to what you see working, you will make progress. She uses the local influencers effectively and she’s defined herself in terms of what is needed and what she can do, rather than what she she was initially interested in.

In the next post I’ll summarise the value of the village visits.

*Finally, thanks to Andrea Buck at Swansea University for the title of this blog. Andrea and I had a conversation about how to drive change in universities and she described it as being a little like a bowl of cold spaghetti. You see the one strand that you want to pull out, but as you tug you realise it’s all stuck together and if you pull really hard it jumps out the bowl and hits you in the face… I love this metaphor and the expression “cold spaghetti” enters my head on a fairly regular basis. Of course it doesn’t imply anything about either Swansea or Edinburgh Universities which are both paragons of effective and efficient decision making…

This post comes from the beautiful campus of IISER, Pune where we are running the Newton-Bhabha Fund workshop this week. After travelling for 20 hours we arrived in darkness so this afternoon ( we were asleep all morning as the transition from UK to India time is in progress…) was our first chance to look around. After a quick check of the training rooms we’ll be using later in the week (which are perfect) a few of the early arrivals took a wander around the campus and a conversation in one of the coffee bars prompted today’s post.

Cricket on campus at IISER, Pune. Photo by Sara

IISER, Pune is a campus based institute with accommodation so it’s reasonable to expect that there will be people around at the weekend, but we came for coffee in one of the academic buildings. We may return to the topic of working hours later in the week when I write up some reflections on the various facets of cultural difference which a workshop like ours will throw up. Aside from this, what struck me was the contrast with an afternoon earlier in the week when I attempted to get a coffee on our Kings Buildings campus. There are a number of cafes but it took three attempts to find one which was willing to serve me at the totally unreasonable time of 3.45pm on a Tuesday. The restrictions on catering when the undergraduates leave reduce the opportunities to meet people from other schools and institutes either by chance or design.

I don’t have anything against departmental cafes. I “grew up” in one which had its own tea-room open for 2 hours a day. This restriction meant that during these times, the whole community mixed – students, researchers, academics, technicians and administrators. I still maintain that the loss of said tearoom was instrumental in the closure of that department some years later and it must have had a pretty instant impact on communication between different communities.

The common thread between these two reflections is that with a small investment of time and a dedicated space which isn’t someone’s office, it’s possible to have a different kind of conversation. Getting to know someone in broader terms than their research interests will help you make decisions about working with them (and in some cases the type of person they are can be a more important consideration than the skills they bring.)

The coffee room we found here was in a building shared by Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology and there were a number of groups chatting and working together. Our tea-time (chai-time?) conversation began with an inevitable winge about access to catering out of undergraduate term time, then overlapped with a chat about new university buildings and sites and the migration of departments to new locations. Both of these situations link to our theme this week because a lack of shared social space and the geographical isolation of part of a university’s community are both detrimental to developing new links and collaborations because they take away chances for us to gently get to know people who are different from us.

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, the programme for the workshop includes a lot of time where the attendees will be discussing ideas and developing possibilities. We’ve kept invited speakers to a minimum for a five day workshop and selected those who can also provide a mentoring role whilst they are with us. As well as allowing the participants to talk about their research interests, we’re also trying to create a relaxed and open atmosphere where more wide-reaching topics are covered. An initial decision to have an evening programme of formal activities is currently on hold – our hope is that we won’t need to nudge people into finding things to talk about and that our problem will be ensuring they get enough rest!

The projects that are likely to develop from the connections made this week will be complex and challenging. Success will depend on many factors, but those involved are only likely to commit to this challenge if they trust the people they’ll be working with. Building trust takes time. Isn’t just about complementary skills and experience, more about finding common ground whether in terms of interests, values or outlooks to life. These things can’t be expressed in a 2 minute introduction in the way people will describe their research at the start of the week. We need time and space to discover new people and then more time and space to decide if they are a good match and balance for us before we invest even more time and space in building links.

I’m not naïve about the complexity and tensions involved in estates planning and aren’t suggesting that decisions are made with the objective of undermining collaboration. Everything is a compromise in university management, but this week I’ve been aware that the seeds of future projects lie as much in the random conversation about university cafes that close at 3pm (and where that takes us) as they will in the conversations about whether your data and my methodology are complementary. When we meet for dinner later I suspect much of the chat will be about the journeys we’ve had here and what attracted us to the workshop and in listening to people’s stories we’ll start to get a sense of their attitudes to life.

Here are some facets of peoples’ outlooks which may emerge in these general ice-breaking chats.

Attitudes to risk – are you someone who always see the problems and potential disaster around every corner or do you generally accept that everything will be ok and even if it goes wrong you’ll probably work out a solution?

Attitudes to rules – is it all about doing things the right way with tried and tested procedures that are familiar, or getting to the right end point whilst not worrying too much about what path is taken?

Attitudes to other disciplines – are you interested in other topics and open to developing research ideas which are influenced by others (do you welcome trespassers?) or do you want to do more with your own research in partnerships where everyone has a defined roles (and doesn’t cross the fence)?

So, if you aren’t priviledged enough to come to a Newton Fund workshop (and a post later in the week will explore why people do), try to find a little time this week to talk to someone different and let them get to know you. My conversations in the last few months have brought me around the world. Where might yours take you?